This collection of papers is drawn from those presented in 2022, at a workshop on early phonological, lexical, and morphological development that my co-editors and I called to mark my retirement from the University of York, in 2020. We planned the workshop around the theme, “Building linguistic systems,” although that was not the main focus of all of the papers. Here, I review the reasons for orienting the workshop in that way, divide the nine papers into five topics—Systematicity, Variability, Memory, Phonological complexity and accuracy in production and Social cues and sustained attention—and briefly summarize each of them. In closing I offer some reflections on the nature of learning as we might now begin to think about it in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
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